Liberation's Kiss: A Science Fiction Romance (Robotics Faction Book 1)

by Wendy Lynn Clark

  The messenger bot’s blank eyes regarded her, soulless as glass.

  She turned back to her screens. “I leave the risk estimation as an exercise for the Transit Authority.”

  The one thing that she knew Xan|Arch hadn’t done was get off planet. The shuttle traffic was still waiting for clearance from Upstairs, a clearance that they would not receive until Xelia|Brae’s assignment was complete. And thanks to their deep space network, they monitored extraplanetary traffic so closely even a speck of asteroid dust was tracked on its orbital plane.

  They needed that for the planet now. When they had that level of detail on the planet, then nowhere would be safe, not even the bottom of the acid oceans or the deepest pit mine into the rubilum farms.

  Her orders had not changed. Execute the target Cressida. Recapture the x-class android Xan. She ran her tongue over the data jack in the back of her throat, suppressing her gag. Once she had him in her chokehold, she would forcefully reconnect him to the Faction. Then he would turn himself in for invasive, destructive analysis.

  The messenger robot clicked. “The Transit Authority requests updated information about the criminals.”

  “Clear your forces from the ‘honeypot’ locations, and direct your employees to contact me immediately if you see any of these.” She shunted over the newest pictures, Xan|Arch with a ripped forehead and Cressida Sarit Antiata in a burned uniform with a dazed expression, taken from her retinal cameras in the men’s decontam a few hours earlier.

  “The Transit Authority does not have authority to remove key security personnel from health stations and hospitals.”

  “Forward the order to someone who does.”

  The messenger robot disappeared abruptly, without a farewell. The equivalent of slamming a receiver. She ignored it as irrelevant.

  “Xelia|Brae.” A disembodied voice addressed her from the only remaining external speaker; she had destroyed the rest when their meaningless beeps and buzzes had disrupted her calculations. “We have located the near-moon subspace defensive network you requested and established control. They are currently pointing out at space. A program has been sent to turn them planet-side on your command.”

  She started to smile. Two thousand satellites with advanced imaging.

  Xan|Arch could not hide.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Xan finished injecting the human ligament regrowth hormone into the surgically inserted patch he had installed over the problematic left knee and recapped the syringe. The human ligament would hold until he got to the mainland and found proper parts, but his feedback sensors now operated at the speed of human pain. He wouldn’t be making giant leaps any time soon.

  Then, he rested his head against the back of the chair and stared at the ceiling.

  What the fuck had he been saying to Cressida?

  She wasn’t alone anymore? She had him? He knocked his head against the wicker as though he could shake loose the idiot from his circuits. He was a disconnected, damaged, reprogrammed android originally assigned to kill her. What a reliable guy.

  He stood and checked his appearance in the mirror. A seam streaked down at the angle of a drone laser. It felt and looked like a Gorgon Five bee sting. All hot and pulsating as if something foreign were alive under there.

  He touched the new ridged line in his eyebrow. More than the temporary human knee ligaments or his increasingly illogical thought patterns, he would physically no longer be able to blend with the other x-classes. One more thing about him had been altered, rearranged, made unique. Because of her.

  That made him feel….

  Fuck. Androids didn’t have feelings. The word was a linguistic anachronism useful only for communication, not representative of the confused morass of half-impulses and unanchored urges currently wrestling beneath his titanium-alloy chest plate.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck.

  He let his hair drop, closed the cabinet, and followed her steady heartbeat down to the kitchen bar.

  She perched on the stool, legs crossed and arms properly tight against her elbows, consuming a large plate of fruit more quickly than socially acceptable. Given her size, she was making up the calorie deficit. Another reason to hate her precious general.

  “You found something to eat,” he said.

  “The unit is like new, so everything tastes great.” She offered a flake of pink coconut, but he shook his head. “I read somewhere that coconut used to be white.”

  He made a grunt of interest.

  “And hard, with a brown outer shell full of hair. And it grew on trees.” She bit into the succulent pink fruit, licking the dripping juices. “If it’s so different now, I wonder if this is how coconut used to taste.”

  He could watch her eat all day. “Like how?”

  “Creamy, sweet, rich on your tongue, like it’s really filling your mouth. Kind of…I don’t know. Coconut-y.” Her dreamy look gave way to practicality. She chewed the pink fibers and swallowed. “I just wonder if it tastes the same as the original.”

  “The original on Rigel?”

  She shook her head. “I wonder if it really did originate on Rigel. You know?”

  “That varietal did.” He swung onto a stool across from her.

  She smiled at him, her spoon halfway to her mouth. “You look better. How do you feel?”

  Her smile was beautiful and shivered through him, not unlike the shock of the bee sting. Strange.

  In absence of the Voice, constantly realigning his actions to the assignment every micro-moment, his brain was beginning to rewire all other sorts of stimuli to take its place. Feelings that once didn’t matter, such as a painful cut or a beautiful woman’s smile, suddenly assumed a new importance.

  A guy could do a lot for a smile like that.

  He shrugged, the entire analysis contained in less than half a blink of an eyelash. “I won’t be dancing Swan Lake until I hit up a titanium-alloy repair shop, but we took out the sting.”

  Her smile slipped. She worked on her cream. “Do we really have to leave here?”

  “Even if you figure out a way to rig up a life pod in the deepest unexplored bacteria-farm tunnel, they will find you.”

  She set aside her spoon. “I meant this island.”

  “The longer we wait, the more infrastructure they’ll have set up on the mainland to recapture you.”

  She met his gaze and then closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. “How long do we have?”

  “A day. Maybe two. Any longer and we’re dancing in front of their crosshairs.”

  She set down her hand with a sigh. It held an edge of exhaustion and something else. Sorrow.

  He reached out and covered her hand with his.

  She blinked, startled, and then smiled.

  He was lost.

  Even though he meant the gesture as a simple 2097-a, comfort a team member, he rolled her taut hand between both of his, massaging the fascia, soothing her. She didn’t protest when he picked up her other hand. Her breathing calmed and evened. He moved up her wrists to her arms, squeezing the shape of her beneath the thin suit, remembering what she had felt like pressed up against him. His cock twitched at the memory. It was a good one.

  At her shoulders, he stood up and went around the counter to stand behind her, moving her silky hair out of his way. His thumbs pressed into the delicate pocket of her rhomboids, where she seemed to carry most of her tension. A moan escaped her lips. She rolled her head forward, bonelessly granting him permission to touch the rest of her.

  And he did.

  Focusing on her hitched breath and moans, he moved her from brick to syrup. Squeezing her softness, smelling the delicate fragrance of her earthy body, awoke a strange craving. One he couldn’t seem to control.

  He wrapped an arm around her waist and dug his fingers into taut muscles along her spine. Her breasts pushed like small weights against his taut forearm, and she seemed to turn her sweet lips toward him as though inviting him to press her even closer.

  His cock pulsed, hard
as a rock.

  He nuzzled her coral-shaped ear. Her breath hitched. He tasted the rim of her lobe, the softness tapering up to hardness, down again, and teased the flesh with his teeth. Her heartbeat jumped beneath his palm. “Mmm.”

  Her murmur pierced his chest.

  She put her hands against the bar for balance. He sucked, and felt her heartbeat jump again, and again. Rhythmic, as her awareness opened to him. He kissed the point of her jaw—salty—and her cheek, following her gasps to the corner of her coconut-sweetened lips.

  “Why are you doing this?” she whispered.

  It was a question that anyone would ask. This wasn’t part of any assignment. So why did he want it so badly? He just wanted to touch her. Intentionality and reason had no explanation.

  “Xan,” she said, breathless.

  He nibbled on her. “I don’t know.”

  That was the wrong answer.

  She slowly hardened beneath his hands and leaned away until he had no choice but to release her.

  She straightened her already perfectly straight robe. “I told you not to do that.”

  Shit. “Sorry.”

  Her frown deepened as though he had said a wrong thing again. Shit. Human-computer interactions hadn’t been his worst class, but no one could tell from his performance right now.

  Cressida put the counter between them and slid her plates into the reprocessor slot. It disassembled the food remains, plates, and silverware into their molecular components for reassembly into a future meal, complete with appropriate serving dishes and cutlery.

  “And, um, how long did you say until we have to leave?” She refused to look at him while she asked.

  Shit, shit, shit. He rested his palms on the counter. “A day, maybe two.”

  “Then where will we go?”

  “Somewhere that alters ID chips.”

  She closed the unit and stepped out of the kitchen.

  Triggered by her absence, a miniature ventilation system fanned magnetic cleansing powder across the bar, adhering to crumbs, and then reversed magnetism to suck it into the wall. It was actually a pretty powerful system; he felt it trying to lift the grime from beneath his fingernails and doing it pretty successfully too. He removed his hands from the bar and dusted the powder off his ripped suit.

  She fixed him with troubled eyes. “There is no way I will ever agree to alter my chip ID.”

  “It isn’t a suggestion. It’s a condition of the continuation of your life.”

  Despite her obvious fear, she lifted her chin.

  Her mistrust triggered a strange, high-pitched noise in his ears, but when he queried his audio receptors, they registered no external sound.

  He flexed his fingers. “Don’t you understand? Another android, another x-class, has come to kill you.”

  “I thought you said you wouldn’t let her.”

  “I may not have a choice.”

  She blanched.

  The noise increased. He struggled to isolate it and said, through the distraction, “I mean, if we defeat her, then another will come, and another, until they have completed my assignment and you are dead.”

  Cressida’s eyes shone white. She stepped back. “Your assignment?”

  Oh, great holy fuck.

  Her voice rose. Shrill. “I was right. You were assigned to kill me.”

  He stepped forward. “Wait.”

  Her hand shot up. “No!”

  He froze.

  Her palm shook. Her other arm folded across her belly. “I came here with you. I let myself be talked into coming to this isolated place…” Her eyes darted over her surroundings, but she was completely hemmed in between the bar and the walls. “I knew it.” Her face whitened. Her lips trembled. “I knew!”

  “Cressida!” He stepped forward and grabbed her wrists.

  She stopped breathing.

  He shook her wrists. “Goddamn it, I’m not going to kill you!”

  She stared sightlessly past him as though waiting for a bullet.

  “Think!” He shook her again, dragging her attention back to him. “You’ve been afraid of the Faction your whole life. I get that, and you’re not wrong. But look at this situation logically, all right? There’s no reason—”

  “You have no choice,” she said faintly. “It’s your mission.”

  “It was.” He let go of her wrists and folded her cold fingers into his hot palms, trying to transfer some of that warmth into her, never minding that his extended inattention to the temperature differential had caused a sweat to break out on the rest of his body. “Then I met you and everything changed.”

  She focused on him again. Disbelief mixed with something else. Color returned to her cheeks, and her balance settled more firmly over her feet. “Please let go.”

  Although he really didn’t want to, he forced his fingers to loosen. She drew her hands away and rubbed them on her thighs, stepped back, and looked away. “I don’t want you doing any more touching.”

  He swallowed the sudden dryness in his throat. “Sure.”

  “Nothing, do you hear me? I don’t want you within touching distance of me either.”

  “Okay.”

  She nodded and, still not meeting his eye, went out to the back veranda.

  He followed her movements around the mansion with his auditory sensors, and when he was sure of her location, he climbed the stairs and eased into a shadowed lounge chair. As calculated, she sat in a lounge chair on the veranda below him, easy for him to see but unlikely to see him. She needed the space. He needed to know she was alive so he could think.

  Did they even have two days?

  He again cursed that he was an action-oriented x-class and not an analytical y-class android. Although they had slipped out of the transit hub, there was always a risk that their pursuers would see him on the security footage, or flag his bad acting as an Outer-Centurian, or note that the private yacht had deviated from its course at the whim of two illegal visitors.

  Better limit themselves to just the one.

  Which meant he now had to get them off this uncharted island in the middle of an acidic sea, sneak onto the mainland, jack into a local network, and find a black market medical facility for Cressida and an equally discreet parts shop for him—if such a facility even existed on a world like this. Never mind that about a million satellites, drones, sentries, and all security, enforcement, and now most likely transit authorities were also looking for the two of them, and Cressida broadcast her identity every time she stepped into range of a sensor, which, depending on the sensor, could be anywhere from ten to fifty feet.

  Oh, and she didn’t trust him or want him to touch her, and definitely didn’t want to get her chip ID changed.

  He flexed his hands, testing the tensile strength of his titanium-alloy bone wrapped in neural-fiber muscle and coated in a thin veneer of blood, skin tissue, and singed dark hairs. This problem would surely paralyze even a y-class.

  Below, Cressida hugged herself, looking more vulnerable and alone than even when he’d first found her hiding beneath her bed.

  Fuck. He would figure this out.

  Together, but separated by distance that seemed much farther than the visible feet, they watched the brilliant tangerine sunset.

  ~*~*~*~

  Cressida passed the rest of the day enclosed in her own thoughts. True to his word, Xan remained out of sight. By the time the second half of a Liberation VI “day”—the hours of tangerine sun plus more hours of intense green planetshine from the gas giant and its three largest moons—faded into true darkness, she had a taste of the future she had predicted to Xan.

  It tasted like a single meal, consumed alone at a bar, while the solitary night wind howled past.

  She put away her utensils, climbed the stairs to the second floor, and stood in the terrace doorway, staring out into the darkness.

  In the glassed cities, the starlight was allowed to filter through naturally to create a twenty-three-and-a-half-hour local day. Soon, the Nar would r
ewire all of the cities to the twenty-five-hour New Empire standard, and no one would see these views but tourists.

  But tonight, the vast star-spatter looked just that. Not poetic, the way her calligraphy described it. But vast and frighteningly empty.

  Cressida hugged her elbows. This must be how her little sister had felt when their parents had chosen to run away with Cressida, leaving her behind. Surely, too, their older brother had faced his own hours of sadness. This was only what she deserved. This, and many more hours like it.

  She turned and climbed into bed.

  Because she had been thinking about her siblings, she drifted into a half doze full of memories of their times together. How, at ten, dark-haired, shy Mercury came alive with a multi-tool, teaching Cressida how to change her alarm pet’s voice to a silly accent. How their brother Aris always got up on special Saturday mornings, no matter how late he’d stayed out with friends the night before, and served her and Mercury coconut cakes of his own invention with sweet breakfast tea. How their parents kept them all close when other families shipped off the kids as soon as the parents were able to do so. How the Sarit Antiata’s home was filled with love and pride.

  On their last family trip, her parents purchased them all stuffed sealotters to commemorate the ocean visit. Even Aris, who was too old for stuffed toys, had accepted the wedge-shaped plush for his girlfriend of the time. Their parents were called away for business at the return shuttle port, and while their children awaited the final promised stop of ice cream, Mercury had somehow managed to drop her sealotter down an open hydrovent. Aris leaped up on the guard rails to grab for it, but the plush was sucked away.

  Mercury’s eyes filled with dark tears.

  Aris and Cressida looked at each other.

  He quickly strode to the station office to go back through the gate to the tourist booths just on the other side. Although too far away to hear the answer, the staff’s body language and emphatic head-shaking clearly showed the direction of the argument.

  “Here.” Cressida pushed her own plush into Mercury’s trembling chin. “You can have mine.”

  “D-don’t you want it?”